The Hundred, T20s, ODIs, that 10-over stuff they play somewhere or other, tip and run, the French variety, the table time-passer with those steel dice-type thingamajigs.
The great game comes in plenty of shapes and sizes but goodness knows what form THAT was.
Because it was certainly not Test cricket.
In an era when the IPL, Big Bash and now, possibly, The Hundred, hold financial sway, traditionalists are never slow to tell us how Test cricket remains the purest form of the sport.
Never slow to tell us it is the pinnacle, the true examination of a cricketer, the steak to everyone else’s burgers, the serious stuff to the hit ’n giggle.
Well, they were not so quick on their keyboards as the farce, albeit a briefly entertaining farce, unfolded on this, er, questionable Ahmedabad pitch.
Events in less than 48 hours out in India turned Test cricket, even temporarily, into a farce.
Remember, not long ago, those traditionalists getting all hot beneath their tightly-buttoned, well-starched collars when the idea of four-day Tests was mooted?
Blimey, what Channel Four would give for a four-day Test right now?
They could have squeezed an entire Test SERIES into five days on this Ahmedabad track and still had time for a couple of episodes of Frasier.
In most sports, but especially cricket, home advantage has always been there to be enjoyed and maximised.
But not to be abused.
That is crossing the boundaries of sportsmanship.
And the last time I looked, cricket was still holding on to a vague Corinthian idea that it is some sort of last bastion of sportsmanship.
Making things inhospitable and unsuitable for the visiting opposition is an integral part of sport.
But while a football club might grow its grass a centimetre or two longer for Manchester City’s visit, they won’t pour hot tar all over it.
They might run cold water through the showers but they won’t electrocute them.
If this had been a county game, the pitch inspector would have been drawing a chalk line around the scene of the crime before dusk.
Yes, England’s shortcomings and selection policies more than played a part in the laughable calamity. There is no hiding that.
But let’s face it, this pitch was not prepared to favour the home side, this pitch was doctored to favour the home side.
And that is simply NOT Test cricket.
